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  • I bet you think you know a person when you see one.

  • For example, I am a person, right?

  • But was I always a person?

  • Was Johann Strauss a person? Or Freddie Mercury?

  • Are they still people? What about a nine-month-old baby?

  • What about a fetus? Or Chewbacca? Or C3PO?

  • To philosophers, ‘personhoodis a technical term.

  • Persondoesn’t equalhuman.’

  • Humanis a biological termyoure human if you have human DNA. That’s it.

  • Butpersonis a moral term.

  • For a philosopher, persons are beings who are part of our moral community.

  • They deserve moral consideration.

  • This distinction is really useful, but it kinda complicates things.

  • Because there might be non-humans that we think deserve moral consideration.

  • And there might be some humans who don’t.

  • But the determination of who’s a person and who’s not, is tricky.

  • And the slipperiness of what constitutes a person is at the core of almost every major social debate issue you can think of.

  • Abortion. The death penalty. Euthanasia.

  • Whether your passion is human rights or robots, science or sociology, you have to get to the bottom of personhood.

  • [Theme Music]

  • Were gonna do something a little different today and head straight into the Thought Bubble.

  • Because I think there’s some Flash Philosophy thatll help us a lot when we start thinking about what constitutes a person.

  • Is Superman a person?

  • I mean, if you encountered Superman on another planet, the question wouldn’t even cross your mind.

  • The way he acts and talks certainly indicates that he’s a person.

  • But Supes definitely isn’t humanhe’s Kryptonian.

  • He lacks human DNA, and is affected by the sun and by kryptonite in a way that humans are not.

  • So, calling him a human is incorrect.

  • But most of us would disagree with anyone who wanted to deny him personhood.

  • Superman’s non-humanity is one of the reasons Lex Luthor hates him. And part of why we hate Lex Luthor.

  • Just because Superman happens to be from another planet doesn’t make him different in any moral way,

  • just like skin color doesn’t make a moral difference among humans.

  • For the people who really know himLois and Jimmy and Ma and Pa Kent

  • there’s no question that Superman is a person.

  • In fact, if anything, Superman might be more of a person than Luthor is.

  • Because Luthor is fueled by hatred and prejudice and a lust for power.

  • He’s less deserving of moral consideration than Superman.

  • So, if Superman is more of a person than Lex, then humanity definitely isn’t what makes someone a person.

  • So, yeah. Is Thought Bubble a person? Bye-bye, Thought Bubble!

  • Now, there are plenty of candidates for non-human persons.

  • Aliens like Superman, as well as artificial intelligences like WALL-E, or Samantha from the movie Her.

  • Many people think some non-human animals are persons toogreat apes like Koko are a good example.

  • But is it possible to be human, yet not a person?

  • Some people believe that fetuses, though clearly human, are not yet persons.

  • Others think that bodies in persistent vegetative states,

  • or that have experienced a complete and irreversible loss of brain function, are no longer persons, either.

  • Still others argue that a human can surrender his or her personhood through grossly inhumane actions, like rape or murder.

  • Many careful thinkers disagree about what personhood really iswhere it starts and stops

  • which explains why we disagree about abortion, and euthanasia, and capital punishment.

  • And I’m sure no one in the comments will be shouting their opinions on the matter at all.

  • But it seems to come down to this question:

  • What must one possess to be part of our moral community, to be deserving of our moral consideration?

  • A contemporary American legal scholar named John Noonan gives us one option

  • he calls it the genetic criterion.

  • This view says you are a person if you have human DNA, and you are not a person if you don’t.

  • The virtue of this view is its simplicity. But its implications are so problematic that most philosophers dismiss it.

  • If all you need to be a person is human DNA, then like my mouth cells are persons. And so are corpses.

  • None of our favorite androidsor aliens, like Supermanmeet the genetic criterion,

  • even though they seem more like persons than, like, you know some of my cells.

  • But American philosopher Mary Ann Warren offers five, more specific criteria that she believes, together, constitute personhood:

  • Consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, capacity to communicate, and self-awareness.

  • These five factors are known as the cognitive criteria for personhood.

  • Warren argues that some humans just aren’t persons, either not yet, or not anymore.

  • In her view, if a being is incapable of communicating,

  • isn’t aware of itself as a self, can’t think, or move around on its own,

  • or isn’t conscious, then she says that’s not a being that we call a person, even if it happens to have human DNA.

  • Now you might have noticed that Warren’s criteria definitely rules out fetuses.

  • But it also kind of rules out young children. Kids don’t become self-aware until at least 18 months.

  • So, Noonan’s criterion seems to allow some obvious non-persons into its definition, like the cells in my spit,

  • but Warren’s criteria may kick out of the personhood club some beings that to you, are clearly people.

  • Then maybe you’d find the social criterion more palatable.

  • This view says that youre a person whenever society recognizes you as a person,

  • or whenever someone cares about you.

  • This one seems pretty intuitive. It says that you matter, morally, when you matter to someone.

  • It allows for society’s understanding of a person to change over time,

  • which seems good when were thinking about something like expanding rights to protect primates, for example.

  • However, if you think carefully about this view, it also means that,

  • if no one happens to care for a particular being, that being simply isn’t a person.

  • It would mean that fully rational, healthy, functioning adult human beings might not have personhood

  • just because no one happens to care about them.

  • And we probably want inclusion in our moral community to be something more than a popularity contest.

  • So, then there’s contemporary Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer,

  • who says that the key to personhood is sentience, the ability to feel pleasure and pain.

  • This criterion ignores the whole idea of species altogether, and instead looks at a being’s capacity to suffer.

  • This view says it’s wrong to cause unnecessary pain to anything that can feel,

  • but if it can’t feel, well, we do no harm by excluding it from the group of beings that matter.

  • So, fetuses younger than at least 23 weeks are not persons, nor are humans in persistent vegetative states.

  • But any animal with a developed central nervous system is a person.

  • Now, some people think that personhood is a right,

  • a sort of ticket to the moral community that you forfeit when you violate the laws of society in a major way.

  • In this view, you can surrender your own personhood through grossly inhumane actions.

  • This line of reasoning is one way that people justify capital punishment.

  • Yes, killing people is wrong, they might say,

  • but if a criminal has surrendered their personhood through their actions,

  • then theyre no longer a person anymore.

  • So we, as members of the State, would think ourselves justified in killing them.

  • Now, so far weve been talking about personhood like it’s a toggle switchyou have it or you don’t.

  • But a more nuanced option is the gradient theory of personhood, which says it’s not all or nothing

  • it’s more like a dimmer switch.

  • So, personhood comes in degrees, and you can have more or less of it.

  • In this view, a fetus would slowly grow in personhood throughout pregnancy, as cognition develops.

  • So a 26-week old fetus would have less personhood than a 34-week old fetus,

  • which would have less personhood than a newborn baby, who would have less personhood than a toddler.

  • And likewise, personhood can be lost as gradually as it can be gained.

  • A lot of people think this is a reasonable way to look at the issue.

  • For instance, you might think a fetus has some degree of personhood, and so deserves moral consideration.

  • But when the fetus is compared with its mother – a being with far more personhood, by this logic

  • then the interests of the being with more personhood gets more weight.

  • So, this doesn’t deny the personhood of either being, but it allows that some beings have more personhood than others.

  • This stuff is hard to talk about. But that’s why were talking about it. Because it merits your attention.

  • Not only does it matter now, as were studying the concept of personhood for its own sake,

  • but the answers you give to these questions are going to be important later, when were studying ethics.

  • So give it a good long think and try to figure out what you believe constitutes personhood.

  • As you consider the factors that you think are most important, be careful how you cast your net.

  • Make sure you include everyone you think should be included and exclude those you think should be excluded.

  • It’s harder than you might think. Good luck.

  • Today we talked about personhood.

  • We considered several criteriagenetic, cognitive, social, sentience, and the gradient theory

  • for determining what constitutes personhood.

  • And we explored how the definition of personhood informs some important social debates.

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